After I was cut from my mother’s backbone, it was up to my father to shape my gullible mind and that’s the truth.

My father was a surgeon, a shaman and a greyhound. A runner in his youth, he thought little of exercise and called himself a cultured couch potato. As a doctor he loved each patient and included them in what he called prayers. Having grown up Catholic, he turned humanist when enough sense came to him and his prayers did not come out the classic way though they were always classy. While he was operating, I imagine they went something like this in his head:

“Dear God, I don’t think you exist, or if you do, you should have done something for me when I asked. You don’t seem to want to ease the burden of the masses, and when I am out of luck, I don’t see you chip in either. Your holy church is a disgrace and your footprints on Earth are filled with blood. You’re a feeble almighty. I know I am having this conversation with myself in my own thick head but it doesn’t matter. So whether you exist or not: do something not for me but for this poor sod on the operating table here. Let him wake up and get better, for all of our sakes and for the good of his children. Thank you, Lord, who I most fervently do not believe in and never will as long as I live, see you later maybe.”

He wrote poems too, some good some bad but they were passionate and his. He loved to read them out loud and his voice never wavered. A poetic dinosaur shedding tears for bards long gone, he sat on a leather couch in the nude, blew smoke rings shaped like wild animals and picked verses out of the thick air.

He was collector and casanova at once. He’d return from scavenger hunts with gold watches, rings, precious books and feathers of exotic birds. They were tossed on shelves, hung from the ceiling, some of them buried. From sexual exploits he returned with stories of women, one for each finger, and I kept count for him when the tales were good. I would remember the names. The penalty for bad stories was obliteration by memory loss.

He never liked that I joined a corporation—he thought business bloodless and bloodlusting both. But he’s the one who taught me how to throw a bow tie round my neck like taming a snake. When I began to write he became excited and worried, too, which wasn’t like him at all but I understood. Words are scary creatures, things of divine making, weapons of mass delusion.

When he died, people wore dark colours and said nice things about him. They played sad music, which he wouldn’t have even liked, and they had his deathmask taken which made him look limp and not like him at all. When they were gone, weeks afterward, I bought a star on the Internet and named it after him, which seemed suitable, given that he is probably still dishing it out to God.

Published in BULL with an interview. Check out the first draft.

(Excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” for NaNoWriMo. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 19, “Prayer”.)

It was getting bright and the people awoke in the village, while seven black women from Nigeria kissed six stubbly men and one woman good-night. The woman had more hair between her legs than any of the men had on their faces. Of the six men, four returned to their wives, who were happy to feel them next to themselves, though they did not know this consciously, only their sleeping bodies made the appropriate signs of mild, friendly grunting and lurched tossing. When the men slipped into bed, they breathed quietly not to wake their wives and, closing their eyes, saw the shapes of the black women they had been with, faceless shapes, gyrating around a dark cauldron in which the women brewed the secret solution that made white men obsess about them. This was a hallucination of course, but a powerful one. In truth, the seven women were chatting their way through last night’s events, drinking strong herbal tea and massaging each others’ necks. Being a whore was an acrobatic emotional feat, though once you had got used to it, it became routine work, as long as you had proper boundaries. None of the women had such boundaries. They had not been brought up with them, so they left themselves completely open to their customers and fell in love, every one of them, each night. The customers returned from them believing that they had been with a hooker, a secret secretion of their sorrows as men, while their bodies were bewitched forever by sirens, who themselves were only semi-conscious of their true powers. If they’d been fully conscious of them, they’d have rented an appartement in Whitehall and taken over the country by commanding its male, love-starved politicians. But they were proud Africans and they had no interest in a small island  with lousy weather and an altogether provincial mindset as far as most things, apart from music and banking were concerned.

why am i looking for inspiration right now? i can still see sunsets, can still get annoyed in the twice daily traffic jams, car against car, making lovers wait and families, bicyclists cruising gaily – what’s missing?

friendship is nothing to me – brotherhood everything. there are a few men who earned my attention and i theirs. we carry each other around in our breastpockets, the pockets of men over male chests thickly covered with goat hair. we eat smelly cheese and sausage on rye and stamp our hooves. we harvest the time left to us, we multiply it by thousand, and we return it to the world. we will be remembered for our courage, for braving the merciless clockwork of modernity. (we take words like this, prune them and fill them in concrete blocks: modernit. we split nouns where it pleases us: we are modern men.) my friends and i wear our hair white and long (but no pony tail, please): we drink orange pekoe.

i am a joycean today, i rub my eye patch with glee,  i reread mysterious lines in the paper: famous critic smashed by giant potato peeler. dublin elected world capital of bunburyism. firecracker discovered under pope’s throne – there is enough drama in this world to fill all papers and all blogs of millenia to come.

i am a wilde man, a beest with telescopic tweezers for fingers: i reach down into the drains and pick up your keys where you lost them: then i follow you home. i open your door behind you, looking everywhere, dropping my eyeballs all over the bookcases to see what you’re reading: i measure the dust weighing on your mind with a scale made of cricket legs.

let us rejoyce: “Is there one who understands me?”

what’s missing? i can still taste water like wine. still smell my woman: the place between her breasts is my fountain of youth. still bicker carrying a bread basket with false teeth. i still get laid like a man, my moisture settling on her bare bush.

i am Y & if you can say my name, you’re Y, too and you must follow me swiftly where i live: in the underbrush of your yearning.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt jamming with joyce.